Curse of the Divine Page 2

She barely registered when people began clapping at the finale.

  When it seemed that he’d never rise, content there on his knees in front of her, hugged by her shadow, Celia pulled him to his feet. The tinkling of coins as they fell to the purple and blue cloth meant that the curtain was drawn. They accepted congratulations, smiled at their well-wishers, and gathered their things.

  She didn’t look at him again.

  The trouble with every conversation they had now, the reason she had trouble looking at him, was that Celia didn’t know who he was at any particular moment.

  He could be himself: Griffin Kay of Rabble Mob fame, the person who’d died once, the smiler, the bull-shitter, the flirter, the illusionist.

  Her plague doctor.

  But the thing Celia hated most might lurk inside him. The thing that had forced Anya into a place so terrible, even a plague doctor couldn’t bear to talk about it.

  Diavala.

  It wasn’t Griffin who was the abomination, yet the two—Griffin and abomination—were inseparable.

  Celia closed her eyes—one slow, forever blink—before she opened them again and they walked away.

  He was a dead thing, and like all dead things, people had trouble looking at him for long.

  Chapter 2

  After half an hour of walking in silence, Celia and Griffin veered off the main road. Their camp was nothing more than the edge of a clearing, their small covered wagon the backdrop, and, on the occasional cool night, a fire. Their small horse, Aaro, dozed under a tree while twilight washed out color.

  After growing up in the largest temple in Asura, then running away and joining the Rabble Mob, a famed theater troupe, sometimes the silence of her new life still shocked Celia. Where had the rest of the world gone? How had it just fallen away?

  Griffin cleared his throat and began humming as he collected stray branches to make a fire. Celia plopped herself near the base of the tree, leaned back against it with her eyes closed, and flexed and extended her fingers.

  Her hands were sore from the work she did every day, trying to fill their coin purses with as many kropi as possible before they got to Wisteria Township. With the ban on traditional tattoos lifted for the first time in generations, everyone wanted one, and Celia’s nimble fingers and artistic skills were in high demand. Most of her clients were the devout: followers of the religion of Profeta, mourning the death of their Divine. They took ink as a form of religious observance to their dead god.

  Others just wanted pretty pictures on their skin.

  Either way, the people of Illinia had finally been given permission, and they were taking it.

  For the first time in Celia’s life she was making her own money, being her own boss. And she hated every minute of it.

  Her last client—the one just before she’d encountered the plague doctor in the town square—had looked to be in her forties, sharp-angled and rough like leather, but she’d trembled the entire time Celia had worked on her forearm. She’d asked for a mass of pennyroyal flowers.

  “People will begin to experiment with dyes now,” Celia had said as she poked the needle into weathered skin. She’d vowed to never use her inkling powers again, so she had to do this the harder, longer, normal way. “Can you imagine if these blooms were actually purple? Tattoos would be paintings instead of sketches.” She truly had no personal opinion about where the art should go now, but airy conversation chased away the dark corners of the places where her thoughts were prone to wander. She forced small talk, sometimes too aggressively.

  She’d also noticed that conversations like this seemed to increase the amount of her tip, and that was the endgame.

  The client ground her teeth against the pain but met Celia’s dark eyes with her light gray ones. They had no spark in them, as flat and as dull as sandstone, but something burned there that Celia recognized. “Do you ask people why they choose what they do?” the pennyroyal client asked.

  That would imply I care.

  Celia bit back her first thought and said instead, “It hasn’t been that long since people have had the option of choosing. I’m pretty sure if I asked that question, most people wouldn’t know how to answer.”

  When Celia was an inkling, the only tattoos she’d done were in the Divine’s service: Divine tattoos were meant to guide behavior, help you toward heaven. This new reality, where tattoos could be whatever a person wanted, was a sharp shift away from that.

  Most of what she’d tattooed the last two weeks were obvious whims, and she was glad. Why would she want to know the secret hearts of strangers? Their insides? But this client had obviously thought about it. She held Celia’s gaze a beat, almost daring her. Ask me, why pennyroyal? Ask me, why seven blooms exactly? Pennyroyal wasn’t a pretty plant—the blooms stomped up the stalk with harsh purple bursts, like a path of bruises. It wasn’t a particularly useful plant either—too toxic to keep in most gardens.

  Celia knew of only one use for it: to stimulate menstruation and, maybe seven times, to clean out the uterus completely.

  The client must have seen something shift in Celia’s eyes. “We do what we have to,” she said, wincing as another particularly painful tug of Celia’s needle scraped into her skin. A tiny drop of blood blossomed, and they watched it together. “We bleed when we need to.”

  Celia pursed her lips. “Or when we’re forced to.”

  The client looked up again, breaking Celia’s concentration. Her light gray eyes looked ghostly, but her tenor of red and orange shades burned bright. “You’re awfully young to be talking like this.” She said this not as though she doubted Celia’s knowledge, but as if she were sad for the truth of it.

  Thankfully, the image was almost done. The client’s house was too musty and damp. After being on the road for two weeks, and many weeks before that, four solid walls felt like a prison.

  Celia had lived in one most of her life, and she recognized the smell.

  “You’re a good sitter,” Celia said, changing the subject. “Some people act like I’m ripping out their tongues with my fingernails.”

  After Celia had washed and dried the tattoo, her client admired it fully for the first time.

  “I can almost smell the mint,” she marveled. “Can almost taste it.” And Celia caught her significant side-eye. How did you get so good at this, considering that two weeks ago it was an offense punishable by execution?

  “I used to be an inkling,” Celia offered by way of explanation. She could have gone further—yes, I’m actually that inkling, the infamous Devil in the Bell Jar—but the client’s eyes were already as round as moons. She dove back into her coin purse for a larger tip. Pity to the homeless inkling, now that her role had been spectacularly burned to the ground and she had no religion left.

  It had been two weeks since Celia had ripped apart the religion of Profeta and left the city of Asura behind in chaos. Everyone knew about her, which made hiding from her fame easy. Just as with the plague doctor, no one expected an exceedingly short, young soul with dark eyes, straight black hair with straight black bangs, and a nondescript black top hat to be that inkling.

  Now, Celia opened her eyes and nodded to Griffin as he sat down with crossed legs on his bedroll. The entirety of the last hour had passed in silence but for his humming.

  He hadn’t taken off his mask yet, nor his bullshit plague doctor smile.

  “I thought it would feel good,” he finally said. His hands, resting in his lap, opened and closed, as if he wasn’t sure whether to hold on to the performance in the square or let it go.

  Celia swallowed. How he must miss performing onstage, loudly, with his people. Probably so much that it physically ached—a bee sting in the center of his chest, a tight grip around his throat.

  And it was her fault.

  “And did it?” she asked.

  He flashed his wide smile at her. “I enjoyed it more before you cornered me.”

  “As I remember it, you cornered me. I didn’t name myself your ruler. Really, you
asked for it.”

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that point.” He poked at the fire with a stick. “But really, it was the least I could do after you defended my honor so valiantly.”

  Abomination. Abomination.

  Remembering the part that had brought her into his act, a sharp pain stabbed behind Celia’s eyeballs, another headache trying to take over. Sometimes she didn’t think it was hyperbole that she would explode from the stress, but fact.

  Griffin fell silent as well, the memory of the old soul and his hostility wedging between them.

  Celia sighed and focused on the muffled hissing noises coming from the fire. Blessedly, it wasn’t raining, but the wood Griffin had used was damp and produced more smoke than flame. “So, we’ll be there tomorrow,” she said. They’d fled Asura, left everyone behind without so much as a goodbye, with only this vague mission in mind: get to Wisteria, find Halcyon.

  “You’re headed toward the devil,” Griffin replied. But those words didn’t make sense coming from him.

  A chill settled around her. Unnatural.

  Celia forgot her headache. Her head snapped up, her heart stuck in her throat, and she pushed her back into the tree so hard she felt the bark dig in deep enough to cut.

  She began to shake.

  For all the suspicion she’d had about Diavala—that she was lurking inside Griffin, biding her time, tormenting her with silence, and even Griffin’s own admitted feelings of unease—this was different. It was the moment before absolute confirmation. The briefest of moments, where any sliver of hope Celia might have had that she was wrong would disintegrate.

  Though she’d tried to goad Diavala into showing herself before this, suddenly it was the last thing she wanted.

  And because she was so scared, she wanted Anya.

  Anya.

  Celia’s hands clenched into fists. Her breathing sped up. She ground her teeth. All within a span of a few heartbeats.

  Don’t lose your composure, Cece. In the far corners of her mind, she let Anya be her practical self. She’s going to try to bait you. Don’t fall for it. Be calm.

  “Diavala.” The word fell from Celia’s mouth like a canister of black powder, landing heavily, loaded and ready to detonate with a spark. Celia pressed her fists to her eyes. She didn’t look up, because she would only see her plague doctor. Too painful, to feel like screaming and scratching at a face you loved. “You’ve been quiet,” Celia said, her teeth nearly fused together. With everything in her, she held back the urge to scream.

  “You should be relieved I took a moment, Inkling.” It was Griffin’s gorgeous singer’s voice saying the words, but not Griffin saying them. Celia heard the layers of centuries underneath. “You killed my purpose, you took away Profeta, the only thing that mattered to me. If I hadn’t controlled myself so well, the collateral damage might have been spectacular.”

  Diavala said this as if Celia should be grateful to her. Celia’s eyes were still closed, but she saw bright starbursts as she pressed her fists harder against her eyes. “The collateral damage was spectacular,” she said. Diavala had taken away Anya, the only thing that mattered to Celia.

  Celia didn’t even know who she was anymore, without her angel.

  “We both know our battle isn’t over, Inkling,” Diavala said. “But now that we’re so close to Wisteria, I think I should warn you about what you’ll find there.”

  Even as the tears began stinging her eyes, Celia almost laughed. “Yes. Listening to you is the perfect plan. I trust everything you say completely.” She took a steadying breath. “You can’t con me away from Halcyon, but I do appreciate the effort. Did you bury yourself so deep in Griffin that you didn’t realize where we were going all this time?”

  Toward Halcyon Ronnea of Wisteria Township: the only person on the Roll of Saints who’d survived Diavala’s Touch. He was nothing more than a name, but one loaded with promise and hope. Halcyon was the only one who might know how to defeat Diavala—Celia’s enemy.

  Unfortunately, her immortal enemy.

  Her immortal enemy who was currently inside Griffin, who couldn’t leave without shredding Griffin’s mind into confetti with the Touch.

  Diavala assessed her for a long moment. The silence between them fell thick and heavy. “Keep hating me. That’s fine, and I expect nothing less. But the fact is, I’m stuck in this body for a good long while, and I know how much you love it. You think I’m the threat here, you think Halcyon survived my Touch because he’s special, because he has answers you need—”

  “All true,” Celia interrupted. “What else do you want to talk about? How about how you killed Vincent? How you were ready to kill dozens more, including children—” Celia’s voice cracked, thinking of Remy on that stage, defiant chin held high, a mistico’s blade ready to pierce the back of her skull. “Or we could go back further, to all the lives you ruined over the years, centuries, of messing with people. You stained so many with your ink, manipulated so many, all so they believed in you as a deity. Well, we both know you’re no deity. You’re a murderer, a con artist, a bottom-dweller.”

  The world was too small to hold all of Celia’s rage. So much for not losing my cool, Anny. Sorry about that.

  “You didn’t mention Anya,” Diavala said in Griffin’s soothing voice.

  Celia’s gaze finally snapped up: Diavala leaning forward intently, dropping her hands, shifting her legs, wearing the plague doctor mask. All of it preparing for battle. All of it with Griffin’s body.

  Celia slammed her eyes shut to wipe away that glimpse. “I liked it better when I knew where you were but you didn’t open your mouth—Griffin’s mouth—to speak. How about you go away again so I can ignore you properly?”

  Diavala tsked. “So dramatic. I’m trying to warn you, Inkling. I’ve dealt with Halcyon before. You won’t come out of this unscathed.”

  “You talk as if you care about my well-being. You talk as if I’m listening.”

  There was a terrible pause, one where not even Anya’s ghost dared tread. Then Diavala whispered, “Maybe you’ll listen to this.”

  Griffin put his head down so his chin touched his chest, the beak of his plague doctor mask pointing straight into his lap like an arrow. For a second, Celia thought Diavala had put him immediately to sleep.

  And then he screamed.

  The sound shredded Celia. So familiar: mistico, Vincent, suffering, pain. So completely Griffin’s voice making those terrible sounds, echoing inside her, then swallowed by the night. She launched herself at him, trying to—do what? She clutched at his chin and tried to pull his face to her, she put her hands in his hair and tore off his mask. It was the sound that meant madness, too many memories, a broken mind. It was the sound that always ended with chloroform, then gashes at the sides of the neck, then bleeding out.

  Sobs burst from her lips like bubbles. Griffin twisted and jerked away from her, his eyes pressed tightly shut, nonsense words competing with his screams. In seconds, his shirt was soaked through with sweat, and it clung to him as she clung to him.

  It stopped as suddenly as it had started.

  “Griffin. Griffin?” Dia, neither of them could catch their breath. She panted. He panted. She took his chin in her hands and tilted his face up to hers, searching his eyes.

  They were glassy and red-rimmed, dazed, but it took only a moment before they focused on her.

  “Celia—” he croaked. His head flopped back down to his chest, and he kept falling. Celia caught him in her lap, sobbing freely now.

  If she could have thought straight through her panic, she would have known that Diavala wasn’t leaving him for good. There was no one else’s body close by for her to hop into except Celia herself, and if she’d wanted that particular revenge, she would have taken it already.

  No, Diavala hadn’t left, but she’d tugged.

  Celia imagined Diavala’s poisonous essence inside Griffin as if it were a rubber band: stretching out, stretching tight, pulling at his mind, torturi
ng him just enough.

  Then springing back.

  Celia cradled his head in her lap, brushed sweat-soaked hair away from his forehead, traced the constellation tattoo beside his closed eyes, and cried.

  It was the closest they’d been in weeks. They most they’d touched.

  And it had happened because of pain.

  Their world was shadows and creeping things and claws.

  His eyes opened again, and he stared up at her.

  It was too hard, that stare.

  Without thinking, Celia pushed him away and scrambled back like a crab, squawking in alarm.

  Looking at Celia with so much hatred that Celia physically recoiled, Diavala hissed, “Are you listening to me now?”

  Celia loathed her with everything she had. As in the square earlier, her rage rose to volcanic all at once, choking her. Griffin’s unique flashing metallic tenor didn’t change; it didn’t give any indication that Diavala was there with him. In a world where everyone had a tenor, the absence of Diavala’s only marked how soulless she was.

  Shaking, flushed, Celia couldn’t speak.

  But she nodded. Yes, I’m listening.

  “Good,” Diavala said. “So here’s the predicament I see. Now that Profeta has ended, I cannot leave this body. Well, I could, if I had any confidence that you could put him out of his misery to keep him quiet.” Griffin’s dark eyes were usually as soft as a doe’s when he looked at her, but no longer. “But I don’t. And so there would be someone in the world loudly proclaiming that everything that had come to pass in Asura had been a hoax. Because how could someone still be Divine Touched? It would make no sense, and people would be forced to rewrite all they understood. You might have taken away Profeta’s future, but I will not allow Profeta to be robbed of its past. My legacy will not die because of this.” She inhaled and adjusted her shirt where it still clung, damp with Griffin’s sweat.

  “So, to my chagrin and yours,” Diavala continued, “I’m stuck inside this one. If there was a way to remedy this, trust me, I would not be keeping it a secret from you.”

  There was a way to “remedy this,” and Halcyon was the one who knew it. Diavala’s reaction—showing herself for the first time in more than two weeks—proved that they were close to the one person who could help them.